Audrone (Audrey) Lapinaite, PhD, is leading a research laboratory at Arizona State University and Biodesign Institute. She earned her BSc and MSc in Biochemistry at Vilnius University (Lithuania) in 2007 and 2009, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg (Germany) in 2013. In 2015 Audrey was awarded a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) fellowship and she joined Prof. Jennifer Doudna and Prof. Jamie Cate laboratories as a postdoctoral fellow.
Audrey’s postdoctoral research focused on understanding the mechanisms of programmable RNA and DNA targeting by nucleases associated with prokaryotic immune systems. Specifically, she was working on understanding the molecular mechanism of programmable DNA base editors (a fusion of CRISPR-Cas9 and either adenine or cytosine deaminases) to guide the design of smaller and more specific next generation DNA base editors.
Now her laboratory focusses not only on the design of next generation precision genome editing tools with enhanced specificity for biomedical applications but also on understanding the molecular mechanisms of recently discovered novel bacterial immune systems with the goal of harnessing them for new genome, transcriptome and epitranscriptome editing technologies.